Quotes About Fiction

As with all types of writing, fantastical fiction depends on the same basic rules.

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype.

I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.

Science fiction is the ugly stepchild of mainstream literature, and fantasy is the ugly stepchild of science fiction, and tie-in novels are the ugly stepchild of fantasy... and on and on and on.

It is truly bracing and instructive to contemplate the End Times - at least at safe remove, in the pages of fiction - especially as the world beyond our hearths churns and convulses unknowably, yet perhaps just short of ultimate disaster.

'Bellyache' is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren't real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don't know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

Ultimately, in my mind, that's what I'm trying to do with my fiction; I'm trying to transport my reader into a different world.

Apocalyptic fiction, while ultimately about God's purposes, usually portrays an immediate, human world of competing conspiracies. Whatever happens is orchestrated, coordinated and planned in advance.

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.

The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.

A story is a wondrous invention.

Some people have their marriages annulled, which means they never existed. Boy, talk about denial! What do you say when people see your wedding album? 'Oh that was just some play I was in.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

There are two kinds of stories, the ones you live and the ones you make up. And nobody knows the difference, and I don't ever tell which is which.

I have been reading the Old Testament, a most bloodthirsty and perilous book for the young. Jehovah is beyond doubt the worst character in fiction.

I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.

Gabriel Well...life is stranger than fiction sometimes.

The self," Blackmore writes, "is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self," she argues, "only multiple parallel processes that give rise to a benign inner delusion—a useful fiction." She argues that consciousness itself is a fiction.

The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational.

If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.